Methodology
– Who is the target audience? Do you have your own list of invitees or do you need a panel of respondents to sample from, or both?
– What combination of online vs hand-written responses might you need and how quickly do you need the results? Bear in mind that unlike online surveys, hand-written surveys take more time to process before a report can be arrived at due to the printing time, posting of blank forms and data entry requirements. They are however still a very effective means of obtaining feedback in many applications.
– Could an incentive be appropriate and helpful in achieving the sample size target you require?
Report
Who does your report need to cater for? A busy board is only going to want to see executive summaries whereas the marketing strategists will need to see a lot more detail.
Starting with a clear visualisation of what the end result needs to be able to communicate and look like makes designing the survey itself so much easier. We can suggest questions and question formats that will yield data in a format that is efficient to analyse and convert into the type of output you require.
Questionnaire
Online vs hard-copy questionnaires can often work in different ways when being responded to. Online respondents can be automatically ‘skipped’ to questions whereas a hard copy respondent will need clear written instructions on where to go next. All this requires more formatting and design to ensure the same required data is yielded.
The process of entering data from hardcopies needs to be considered also. A lot of ‘comments’ in a hardcopy questionnaire can add considerably to the data entry cost. We can advise on what is essential vs nice-to-have.
What branding do you need? This can be an important consideration if you are carrying out sensitive market testing, or if you are contracting to a 3rd party client and it is their branding that is required. Our team are experienced in applying branding themes, logos and engaging images in ways that don’t impact on the load-times of online surveys, and which are appealing on printed questionnaire forms also if these are required.